[...]About that Greek public sector | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

[...]About that Greek public sector | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

[...]About that Greek public sector | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

[...]About that Greek public sector | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

[...]About that Greek public sector | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

You’re telling us: at time T, regime A takes over from regime B. At time T, the civil service is reasonably small, the government is well-run, the economy is doing fine.

At time T+40 years, the country is bankrupt, the civil service is bloated like Brezhnev, and anything that remains of the private sector is mired in apparently eternal depression.

And, naturally, this is the fault of regime A! Unbelievable, gentlemen – unbelievable.

Go rent a copy of “Z” and watch the first 10 minutes. You’ll see what’s wrong with Greece. Greece fought the mildew. And the mildew won.

Amazingly enough, Dimitrios Ioannidis is still alive, albeit in jail. Presumably he can read Kathimerini as well. I wonder what he thinks Greece’s problem is. I suspect his theory makes a lot more sense than the Economist’s! Do the words “tanned, rested and ready” ring any bells for any of you Eurotrash?

Ioannidis! Ioannidis! Because history isn’t over…

The South Korean and German examples of bust aren’t that good. The explanation in the post seems to be that a history of authoritarianism matters because it would lead a country’s political class to be more accommodating to interest group pressure, creating fiscal irresponsibility. Well, South Korea has this history, but that didn’t prevent Kim from going head to head with the chaebol. Whatever caused the crisis, it wasn’t post-reform politics – for one, Kim only took office a couple of months before the crisis. Germany, maybe. It did pour a lot of money into the East. But countries routinely subsidize their poor regions, and take economic hits in their rich regions for it, regardless of history.

If you’re just expanding the definition of crisis and stagnation to include everything in recent history, then South Korea isn’t any different from Sweden and Finland, and Germany isn’t any different from France.

The claim was never that a troubled past inevitably leads to bad economic performance. The claim was that in order to understand current economic performance it is better to look at the history of a country’s political and economic institutions, rather than relying on generalizations about national character or local culture. Do you disagree with that?

By the way, I also cannot resist pointing out that your comparisons are a bit absurd. The South Korean economy went bust and had to resort to the IMF barely a decade ago; Germany struggled, and still struggles, with the aftermath of reunification (check out the unevenness of unemloyment figures, the rise of neo-Nazism in the East, etc.); Hungary is, as we speak, hardly in any better shape than Greece; and so on and so forth. Don’t make quick judgments based on what happens to dominate the headlines for the last few weeks.